Tracer
With respect to your example of the lifelong sinner who chooses heaven at the last moment, I think that the conventional Christian take goes something like this: while you’re waiting for the train, you lurk around the station, mugging people and scamming people, or otherwise doing what you will. Then, just as the train is about to move away, you quickly buy a ticket, go through the turnstile, and lo and behold! Your gamble has paid off, and you now are suddenly no longer interested in mugging and scamming. Ever. For the rest of eternity. I agree that nothing could be more bizarre.
And in fact, conventional Christianity uses the parable about the workers in the field — some of whom worked all day, and some of whom worked only an hour, but all of whom were paid the same wage — to frame their viewpoint. Likewise, the thief on the cross who joined Jesus in paradise. And other things, like Jesus saying, “The first shall be last, and the last first.” It is a viewpoint that I have heard called “saddle to stirrup”. In other words, a man is shot while riding on his horse. He might repent as he falls, and be saved between the time his butt leaves the saddle and his foot comes out of the stirrup.
It is, in my opinion, difficult to understand what is going on without a fundamental understanding of what sin is. My viewpoint differs from the convention because I define sin so differently. I define sin as the rejection of love, and love as the facilitation of goodness. Therefore, sin is the rejection of an offer of goodness.
I believe that many people commit seemingly evil deeds, not because they are evil people in the conventional sense, but because they have been denied love (facilitation of goodness) by the vast majority of those around them. Jesus warned the Pharisees about the way they travel to the ends of the earth to find one convert, and having found him, turn him into twice the son of hell they are themselves. This is because they do not love the man when they find him; rather, they weigh him down with the burden of law.
They view sin as breaking the rules. And of course, being politicians at heart, they interpret the rules in ways that benefit them. Tithing, for example, is a very important law. Not stealing is very important, because if you were allowed to steal, they might lose some of their wealth. Murder is a sin to them, not because they value human life in general, but because they value their own lives above all others.
But if you think of sin quite differently, you see the application of goodness and evil with respect to heaven quite differently as well. Jesus teaches that our heart and its yearnings are identified by what we treasure. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” He teaches about people who are “poor in spirit” and says that theirs IS the Kingdom of Heaven. These are people to whom love has been denied.
The real sinners are those who have severed God’s love, and stood as obstacles between God and the spiritually poor. To love is to facilitate goodness. To sin is to cut goodness off. Love and sin are opposites.
And yet, man cannot interminably mediate in this fashion. Eventually, the spiritually poor will see God face to face. What the Pharisees and other politicians have represented as “God” to them will be nothing like what they see with their own spiritual eyes. They will see what they have yearned for their whole lives, what they have always treasured.
Their lifelong deeds were born, not of evil desires, but of frustration from not having the fulfillment of their true desire — their desire for love. The prostitutes and tax collectors and thieves whom Jesus courted responded to Him with adoration and life-commitment, not because they thought He brought them a better set of laws, but because they saw in Him the love that they had sought out all their lives.
Repentence is not a matter of giving up something. It is a matter of finding something.
Heaven is comprised of those who treasure goodness. Sometimes people steal because they covet what they’re stealing, but not always. Sometimes they steal because they believe that goodness has been stolen from them. Sometimes people murder because they hate or because they crave power and control, but not always. Sometimes people murder because they believe that goodness is dead.
There is neither goodness nor evil in the atoms. They are amoral — without morality, either good or bad. Morality is in a man’s heart. It is because of this that our moral judgments are worthless, since we are not privvy to the essences of other men. Their experiences and their consciousnesses are closed to us. We make ethical judgments because we value our society, but moral judgments are outside our capability.
Even God Himself, who knows our hearts, does not judge our morality. Jesus teaches that neither He nor His Father judges us. Rather, we judge ourselves by the Word of God Himself. And Jesus is the Word of God. That is, Jesus is the Standard of Goodness and the Love Everlasting by which we measure our own values. We decide when, and only when, we see Him for ourselves whether He is what we always have treasured from the depths of our being.
Some of us see Him in this life, and some before others. Some of us don’t see Him until He greets us when our earthly lives have finished and our atoms are shed. This is the judgment: when we stand face to face with Him, whether now or later, and recognize whether or not He is the longing of our soul. What men have claimed about Him, what books have said about Him, whether or not we even ever knew His name — these things will have no bearing, because He will stand before us as He is.
People sometimes complain that God put us through all this. Why, they ask, didn’t He just make goodness unseverable to begin with. But people are a fickle lot. Had God done this instead of that, they would be complaining that God must be hiding something. What is this thing called evil? Why can’t I stand between you and God? What could possibly be wrong with that?
God instead made us like Himself — free moral agents, capable of both good and evil. God does not choose goodness because He is incapable of choosing evil. God chooses goodness because goodness is the aesthetic that He values above all others. The atoms give us a mis-en-scene that helps us to contextualize our moral choices.
Thus, in the example that I gave of the man waiting for the train, here is how it really goes: he sees trains passing by the whole time he is in the station, but none of these is the train that he is longing for. He mugs and scams his way through the station because he has come to believe that his train will never arrive. People who have claimed to be experts on trains have told him with each train that stops, “This is the one. Get on this train.” But he alone knows what he treasures, and therefore where his heart will be. He has wasted enough money on train tickets.
At last, one day, possibly when he least expects it, the train that he has waited for his whole life pulls into the station and stops. It is the most beautiful train he has ever seen. It is perfect to him in every detail. It is exactly the train that his heart has always hoped was there. Suddenly, he is filled with faith and fulfillment because he sees with his own eyes the Golden Train.
He hurriedly reaches into his pocket to buy a ticket, but the conducter of the train comes out to greet him. “Friend,” the conducter says, “you need not pay one dime to ride this train. I built it for you before the world began because I love you. Your fare has been paid in full. Come and inherit that which your heart has longed for all these many years.”
The man does not change his desires to accomodate the train, deciding that well, now that he is here, he will just resign himself to liking this train rather than some other. Rather, the train is the fulfillment everything that is within his being. He hasn’t changed. He has simply found his home.
The Kingdom of Heaven is free from sin, not because it is comprised of sinless people, but because it is comprised of people who value goodness. The sinlessness is not in the people, but in the heaven. There is no weakness that men who treasure power above goodness can exploit to their advantage. There is no way that men who treasure control above goodness can stand between you and God, because God is spirit and so are you. You are one with Him now and cannot be separated except by your own free will. You and God are making eternal love. And goodness is in abundant supply.